‘World War Z’ is the most ambitious zombie film to date

Looking over the past few years, it would appear that the most popular subgenre for horror films has become zombies. Ever since George A. Romero popularized the idea of the zombie apocalypse in his “Living Dead” films, it appears to have grown exponentially. We have serious zombie films, like Romero’s. We have comedies, like “Shaun of the Dead” and the recent “Cockneys vs. Zombies.” There was even a romance zombie movie this year: “Warm Bodies.” On television, “The Walking Dead” is in its third season.

With all of that money being made, it was perhaps inevitable that a really big zombie movie would be made, and that some big Hollywood star would be attached to it. It’s here: “World War Z,” loosely based on the book by Max Brooks, has brought the big budget to the zombie apocalypse genre.

Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is a retired U.N. troubleshooter who specialized in going into war-torn areas and reporting the situation to the U.N. As the film opens, he and his wife Karin (Mireille Enos) are woken up by their two kids at their home in Philadelphia. They sit at the family table to eat breakfast, while the TV news starts discussing some kind of strange outbreak that has caused martial law to be declared in some areas.

While stopped in downtown traffic, a police motorcycle snaps off Gerry’s side-view mirror but doesn’t bother to stop. Gerry gets out of the car to check on the damage, and sees an explosion down the street. He gets back in the car just as another motorcycle cop pulls up and admonishes him to “stay in his vehicle.” Suddenly, the cop is taken out by a speeding garbage truck that is plowing through the stalled traffic. Gerry gives chase to the truck, seeing it as his way out.

After a few frenetic seconds of driving, an ambulance plows into the Lane’s car, disabling it. Gerry gets his family out and turns in time to see a crazed figure head butt its way into a car, drag the driver out, and viciously bite him in the neck, killing him. The body jerks violently and Gerry starts counting the seconds as the dead body reanimates itself and gets up, then proceeds to attack the other occupants of the vehicle.

Gerry has seen enough. He piles his family in an abandoned Winnebago and starts to drive off, but now the undead are starting to chase him, trying to break the glass and get inside. He manages to escape, but he and his family are badly shaken. On the road, his former boss at the U.N., Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokena) calls his cellphone: he’s calling him back in; the pandemic has gone worldwide. He promises to send a helicopter to pick him up.

Extras: Available on the BD and 3DBD only.

Unrated cut: Adds about seven minutes, but I couldn’t tell you where. It seemed that the stairwell escape sequence was a bit more drawn-out and scary.

Origins: Featurette discusses the challenges in taking the Brooks novel to the big screen; the film’s producers admit that bringing the multiple-narrative novel to the big screen was a problematic situation.

Looking to Science: A few scientists explain the concepts behind the rapidly advancing pandemic that becomes the “Z” war.

WWZ – Production: Four part mini-documentary covers the shooting of the city scenes, with Glasgow, Scotland standing in for downtown Philadelphia; and Malta standing in for Jerusalem; the escape from Korea; the special effects involved in the “wall” and the overthrow of Jerusalem; and the final act in the WHO building.

Digital and Ultraviolet copies

When I saw this at the theater this past summer, I was struck by how many production companies had their logos at the film’s start: five in total. My initial thought was, “Uh-oh. Too many fingers in the pot.” Reading the production history on Wikipedia, I was correct. But it was surprising that the film did maintain a coherent structure and stuck to the rules it had established. The deus ex machina that Pitt’s character came up with in the film’s third act made sense.

Brooks’ sprawling novel was a series of personal experiences told by subjects interviewed by a U.N. researcher, seeking to put together a narrative of how the “Z” war began and progressed around the world. Making it into a feature film changed it to the perspective of a single U.N. troubleshooter (Pitt), who is tasked with finding out where the outbreaks first began in the hopes of finding a cure or at least a stopgap measure. It’s a method that would have worked much better for me if it weren’t for the fact that the novel’s narrative was so much more compelling. I think that this project would have been better served as a TV miniseries, like the recent “Under the Dome.”

One of the points of the novel (and its genesis, “The Zombie Survival Guide”) was how fast the “Z” virus took over its hosts. That speed is replicated in the film, with pretty frightening results. The novel and film also turns the convention that zombies are lethargic creatures on its head. The spectacle of all of those zombies scrabbling for new victims is genuinely scary.

But even though I appreciated it as a plot point, the skeptic in me cried foul, because no virus that I know of kills its host that quickly, only to reanimate the dead flesh within seconds. That’s why I don’t care for the zombie genre; the illogic of it by the known rules of biology keeps setting off my BS detector.

Even though I’m not a zombie fan, I went to see this film because I had been so impressed by the novel, and the film’s trailers promised some fairly impressive special effects. I didn’t feel as if my money had been wasted, as it was impressive and scary, as intended. But I did feel a little cheated because I felt a lot of what made the novel so good was missing. There were also too many supporting characters that didn’t seem as effective as they could have been.

Bottom line: For what it is, this is a worthwhile purchase, especially for those into the zombie genre. It feels like what would happen if a worldwide zombie apocalypse really took place, and Pitt is good in the leading role. It’s only in the third act, where action gets swapped for suspense, where the film starts to lose some of its traction.